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Nexus Quality Suite - MethodTimer Features

The MethodTimer tool is a performance analyzer. It measures and reports activity in your code with the purpose of identifying performance bottlenecks. Specifically, MethodTimer records routine calls and reports time spent in each routine. It also shows you a list of routines that are called from a particular routine and how much was spent in a routine on behalf of a calling routine. In addition, MethodTimer contains a disassembler that reports the clock counts and pairing issues that affect the efficiency of your code.

The MethodTimer identifies where your program spends the majority of execution time. With a Quality Suite MethodTimer profile in front of you, you can make code transformations in specific areas to improve the performance of your code.

Project Page

The project page lists the modules (.exe and .dlls) that make up your project. You can include or exclude modules from analysis and view module information.

Routines Page

The Routines page lets you select the routines you want to analyse. Loading an application for analysis causes this page to be populated with data in the format of a routine list.

The routine list can be viewed in a number of different layouts. Choose the desired view from the Layout Selector combo box on the tool panel or from the context menu displayed when you right-click the application area. The following table identifies the available built-in layouts.

Layout

Result

Routines

All routines are displayed in a non-grouped layout.

Routines By Scope

All routines are grouped by scope.

Routines By Module/Scope

All routines are grouped first by module, secondly by scope.

Routines by Binary Module/Source Module

Routines are grouped first by binary module, secondly by source module.

Profile Page

When the application terminates, Quality Suite MethodTimer generates an execution profile and shows it on the Profile page. This page displays three related views separated by splitter bars. The top grid displays the list of methods and their profile timings.

When a method is selected in the top list, the bottom left grid displays the "Calls to Current Routine" View.

When a method is selected in the top list, the bottom right grid displays the "Calls from Current Routine" View.

Comparison Page

The Comparison page lets you compare profiles from different analysis sessions. Once you have two profiles in memory, you can compare them side by side using the Comparison page. Sessions are automatically saved and can be loaded from earlier runs of the tool.

Trace Page

The Trace page shows the execution trace of the module being analyzed assuming tracing has been requested. Each source line executed is shown with a time stamp, a thread ID, and location information—that is, the corresponding routine and line number.

Tracing is mainly used for debugging deadlocks. If your application stops responding, running it in the Qality Suite CoverageAnalyst with tracing enabled lets you determine what the last source line executed was for each thread. From that, you can typically determine the cause of the hang quite easily.